In The Possibility of Evil, does Miss Strangeworth seem like a reasonable person? Explain your answer.

Miss Strangeworth must seem like a reasonable person to everybody in her town, but we readers know she is really insane. There are several indications that she is insane. One is that she makes accusations without having any evidence. She suggests that Mrs. Harper's husband is having an affair with another woman. She suggests to Mrs. Foster that her nephew might be bribing her surgeon to kill her on the operating table. She suggests that Don Crane's six-month-old infant girl is probably mentally retarded. She has already created serious trouble for Linda Stewart and her boyfriend Dave Harris by suggesting to Linda's parents that the two teenagers are engaging in sexual intercourse. Miss Strangeworth does not have even the slightest bit of evidence for her accusations. This is what makes her seem insane.

Miss Strangeworth never concerned herself with facts; her letters all dealt with the more negotiable stuff of suspicion. Mr. Lewis would never have imagined for a minute that his grandson might be lifting petty cash from the store register if he had not had one of Miss Strangeworth's letters.

Another indication of Miss Strangeworth's possible senile psychosis is that she does not realize she is causing so much trouble with her poison-pen letters. She notices that many people seem anxious or worried, but she has no idea that her letters have anything to do with their problems. Furthermore, she does not realize her own motives for writing these anonymous letters. She thinks she is doing her civic duty, when in fact she is probably motivated by envy and jealousy. She envies Mrs. Harper for having a husband when she has been an old maid all her life. She is jealous of Don and Helen Crane for having a beautiful baby, when she has never been able to have one herself because she has never even had a husband. There is a lot of secret anger and hatred concealed behind the mask of a sweet little old lady which she presents to the townsfolk.

Anybody who does what Miss Strangeworth has been doing for the past year--sending those poisonous letters to people she knows personally--cannot be considered "reasonable." Only Don Crane knows that Miss Strangeworth has a dark side to her character, but he may not tell anybody else what he knows because he would not want them to suspect him of chopping up her rose bushes. Furthermore, Don Crane doesn't know that other people have been receiving Miss Strangeworth's poison-pen letters. And she doesn't know that Don knows who sent him that letter in which she wrote:

DIDN'T YOU EVER SEE AN IDIOT CHILD BEFORE? SOME PEOPLE JUST SHOULDN'T HAVE CHILDREN SHOULD THEY?

So she may go on writing those letters for a long time until she has created utter chaos in the town she feels duty-bound to protect.